Though our good old chum the Amiga has always had the advantage over consoles such as the SNES and Megadrive as far as churning out great strategy romps. RPGs and adventure games goes, it's never really been a machine that's got completely to grips with the genre of the mighty beat em up. Shadow Fighter was perhaps one of the more memorable recent (ish!) attempts, while the Mortal Kombat titles remain about the closest thing to an Amiga beat'em up 'legend' we've had.

Don't give up

Of course, that's not to say that various Amiga games makers haven't tried - goodness no - but though many technological breakthroughs have been achieved on the Commodore machine, finding a way of shifting Street Fighter-like sprites around at a half-decent speed with a half-decent appearance has always alluded the various coding geniuses!

However, all is not lost, as every once in a while some unknown coder turns up with something quite cool and those of you that read CU Amiga Magazine last month will no doubt have read with some interest Lisa Collin's review, last issue, of a European Street Fighter wannabe going by the name of Fighting Spirit. Though it scored reasonably well, it's proving difficult to actually get your hands on thanks to a lack of UK distribution (however. Direct Software may be stocking it very soon, we'll let you know as soon as we find out when) and was also only available for enhanced machines - ah, until now this is ...

Simplicity

Yes the non AGA version is here, boasting less presentational goodies and loading in at one disk lighter but remaining thankfully similar. You still have your ten main characters to chose from, each bristling with special moves and various attack styles, accompanied by their various attractive backgrounds and animations. The speed of play is pleasingly playable, and the intelligence of the CPU-controlled opponents is conducive to reasonably good competitions. The dodgy English in places is always good for laugh. The loading animations are also funny and feature a little guy firing bricks out of his bum, no prizes for guessing what that's supposed to represent.

Sadly, as always seems to be the case, the like of Fighting Spirit will never come anywhere near troubling the best console beat em up of the world, but it's certainly one of the better offerings violent Amiga owners have had over the last twelve months. I can't pretend that I'll be coming back to this time and time again, but compared to like of US Gold's heinous Street Fighter conversion, you can't help but commend the producers on a fine effort.

A fighting game with amazing AGA graphics! A bit similar to Shadow Fighter or Street Fighter. It has beautiful colorful backgrounds, two player mode, tournament battle, many selectable characters including dragons and powerful creatures.